Elysium (Movie Review)

A WORLD OF EXTREMES

I’ve seen Elysium a few times now and I’m realizing how much Neill Blomkamp tries to make his movies futuristic, but also realistic. Here are my observations:

TERRIBLE PEOPLE WITH MONEY

Elysium is a space station for all of the richest people on earth.

It has machines that can cure cancer by just scanning your body and removing the cancer.

Why aren’t these machines provided to people on earth? Surely there are some rich people that are also generous and philanthropists?

This is when we realize that it’s not just people with money on Elysium, it’s terrible people with money.

People who only care about themselves and their families.

If there are good people on Elysium they are probably silenced by the worst people who have the most money.

WHY NO FORCE FIELD?

It seems that anyone can fly in a ship from Earth to Elysium (if they have a ship).

The only way to stop “immigrants” is to shoot them out of the sky(not the greatest for PR), or let them crash land in someone’s backyard, then arrest them and deport them.

Blomkamp could have just created a force field around Elysium but maybe force field technology is not very scientific and it doesn’t make sense.

Either way, he didn’t take the easy way out of this immigration issue and left Elysium with this problem of having people trying to break in all the time.

NEVER LEAVE A COMPUTER IN CHARGE

“Citizens” of Elysium are basically programmed into Elysium’s central computer.

So you have a computer that is making the decisions and you have terrible people in control of that computer.

What happens if these people change their mind or if someone changes their mind for them?

The rest of earth is basically in a “nothing left to lose” scenario so why wouldn’t they risk their lives constantly to try to get to Elysium or even take it over?

OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE SCALE OF DISGUST

Jodie Foster and William Fichtner’s characters are really disgusting as self-obsessed, condescending Elysium citizens, who have to “deal” with the human bugs on Earth.

As disgusting as they are with their elitism, we are then exposed to Sharlto Copley’s mercenary character, who is disgusting in a different way.

He’s got no problem killing people for money, even children. He has all of these technological implants that make him stronger and he gets excited at the various new weapons that can kill people in different creative ways.

Here we have opposite ends of the scale of disgust, which makes us want neither as reality. Do we want an elitist society that cares only for the rich?

Do we want an “every man for himself” society where the strong and opportunistic survive?

We don’t want either of these things, which helps us relate to Matt Damon’s character. The guy who is trying to clean up his life and just wants a steady job and a normal life.